CAPITALISM: THE UNKNOWN IDEAL. Ivy League Analysis Destroys Biden’s Entire Argument for Multi-Trillion-Dollar ‘Build Back Better’ Spending Plans.

Analysts at the Wharton School of Business reviewed President Biden’s latest $1.85 trillion framework proposal and ran the numbers to project its likely economic impacts, under two distinct scenarios. One is the rather unrealistic scenario where it actually only costs $1.85 trillion. Yet because the proposal is structured with many budget gimmicks and short-term spending authorizations that would likely be reauthorized if implemented, its real cost could be as much as $4.25 trillion. Wharton also modeled the likely impact of this scenario.

In the first case, where the president’s plans cost only what he claims, the analysis still finds his promises falling short on nearly all counts. The tax increases included would not, in fact, pay for the entire proposal, and it would lead to a 2 percent increase in government debt over the long run. (That might sound small, but it’s hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars!) And, while Wharton projects that wages would increase slightly, it finds that the overall economy would shrink, not grow, while business investment and hours worked would decline.

Erm… how’s that revitalizing America? And those dismal results are under Biden’s rosy assumptions. Under the more realistic scenario where spending provisions are accurately accounted for and the real cost is north of $4 trillion, the investment’s return is even more spectacularly awful.

Last week, Joe Manchin told CNN, “We don’t have the numbers that FDR had or that Lyndon Baines Johnson had in order to get some major, major legislation done.”

But Manchin is wrong about Biden not being LBJ in one sense: As Amity Shlaes wrote in her 2019 book, Great Society, “What the 1960s experiment and its 1970s results suggest is that social democratic compromise comes close enough to socialism to cause economic tragedy…In the pain of the 1970s and early 1980s, many Americans came to recognize that the ultimate executive-led expert-driven social project of the 1960s, the White House application of Keynesian economic doctrine, was also the ultimate domestic failure. In retrospect, citizens finally saw Keynesianism for what it was, mere window dressing for political expedience. The popular expression of these new insights was the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.”

This administration has of course, forgotten those lessons: Milton Friedman’s Revenge.